Contemporary Ergonomics, 1994: Proceedings of the Ergonomics Society's 1994 Annual Conference, University of Warwick, 19-22 April 1994 : Ergonomics for All

Synopsis

This is a volume in the international "Contemporary Ergonomics" series, which forms a record of the proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Ergonomics Society, held at Warwick in 1994.; The refereed contributions cover the full spectrum of current experience and practice in ergonomics, and its relevance to the workplace, industry, transport, the home and leisure pursuits. The keynote address is entitled "Function Allocation in Manufacturing" by Colin G. Drury of the State University of New York, USA.

Excerpt

Allocation of Function schemes have been presented since the earliest ergonomic interventions in large scale systems. They are logical, and grow in comprehensiveness in successive generations, but are difficult to apply in small-scale design projects. a scheme based on errors is proposed, as errors are rapidly becoming the major criterion for manufacturing industry. Using the example of circuit board inspection an error-based scheme is developed. Three direct tests of function allocation are summarized to provide general allocation guidelines for such tasks.

The Need for Function Allocation

As manufacturing systems change, they offer more possible alternative allocations of function between people and other system elements. Technical advances in integration between machines and computing power have provided us with capabilities which are not only new but which force us to rethink our allocation philosophy. An obvious example is that computing power can be widely distributed yet inter-connected, instead of being either centralized or isolated. At the same time, new (to most manufacturing industry at least) forms of work organization are being given serious attention, suggesting different ways to allocate functions between people as well as between people and machines.

In such interesting times, the research efforts are typically concerned with large systems such as aviation (Wiener and Nagel, 1988), nuclear power (Price and Pulliam, 1983), the military (Pulliam and Price, 1985) and automated road transportation (Alicandri and Moyer, 1992). However, parallel efforts are on-going in manufacturing industry, although typically again at the larger system level of design to product (Siemieniuch, 1993), computer integrated manufacturing (Badham and Schallock, 1991) and flexible manufacturing systems (Horte and Lindberg, 1991).